ASEAN's Positioning amidst a Changing Global Order
An Interview with Professor Yuen Yuen Ang, the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University.
Professor Ang, many commentators argue that we are witnessing a fundamental shift in the global order, moving from U.S. dominance toward a more fragmented or multipolar world. However, history is full of moments when collective anxiety amplified perceptions of rupture such as Y2K, when fears over date-coding shortcuts triggered widespread alarm about systemic collapse, or the 2012 end-of-the-world narrative.
From your perspective, are we truly experiencing a structural change in the global order/ new global (dis)order today, or are we seeing a similar episode of narrative herding?
Thanks a lot for having me. That’s exactly the right question to start with: is this moment of disruption really different from the ones before it?
I’d say yes. There have always been crises and turbulence, but they happened within the parameters of the post-1945 world order. That order rested on three promises: geopolitical stability under American and Western leadership; mass industrialization that would raise material standards; and globalization that would spread prosperity through trade. I call this the “grand bargain” of the post-1945 order — developing countries accepted structural inequality in exchange for the promise of development.
Today that order is breaking down on multiple fronts, and structurally, not as a one-off shock.
Geopolitically, American leadership is not just diminishing; the United States is choosing to withdraw from the very multilateral order it built. Even the transatlantic alliance, long assumed to be unbreakable, is under strain, leaving Western Europe confused and at times stunned.
The rules of globalization are being rewritten too. The Western economies that once championed free trade are now leaning into protectionism and industrial policy. For late-late developers in Southeast Asia, such as Cambodia and Vietnam, that means the old playbook of growth through export-led manufacturing is no longer a guarantee.
Add those dimensions to climate change — and yes, we are living through a moment of unprecedented disruption. Earlier in Project Syndicate, I further argued that 2025 marked the year the post-1945 order expired and a new one is about to be born. Symbolically, 2025 is a “perfect square” year: 45 multiplied by 45, a rare symmetry.
In your work, you’ve argued that the emerging global developments may be better understood not simply as a polycrisis, but as what you call a polytunity.
How does the concept of polytunity help us better interpret current global dynamics, and what does it reveal that conventional multipolar frameworks might miss?
Western elites coined a term for overlapping crises: polycrisis. I agree with one part of it — the disruptions we’re seeing are interconnected and mutually reinforcing.
But I reject the mood that comes with it: mourning and paralysis. And I reject its false globalism. Western elites are especially alarmed this time because the crises threaten the Western-led order and the promises they made — about democracy, capitalism, free trade — all now under pressure. They can’t quite explain why things are breaking down, yet they still hold outsized agenda-setting power. So they project their own anxiety—the polycrisis of Western decline—as a global catastrophe, in which everyone is presumed equally helpless.
That’s a manufactured mirage, broadcast by powerful platforms. I wanted to challenge it with a counter-narrative: polytunity.
Polytunity names this moment as a once-in-eighty-years opening to deeply question and transform global institutions and thought. It isn’t optimism — it’s realism, grounded in the recognition that real change becomes possible only when the old order breaks down.
But a polytunity has to be acted on. For Southeast Asia, that’s a genuine challenge, because the region’s outlook was shaped by more than a century of colonialism: the belief that the weak must emulate the strong, and that development means assimilating to them. If the authorities in the West say “polycrisis,” the reflex is to echo it, not to sing a different tune.
“Multipolar” is just shorthand for the end of the unipolar order. It fixes our attention on political headlines: what Trump or Xi said, who’s “winning.” What it misses is the intellectual power of dominant nations: their grip on agenda-setting, their ability to define the global. The polycrisis is the perfect example: Western in origin, yet global in claims. Post-colonial nations, long used to following, barely register or appreciate this kind of power. Yet how can you truly exercise agency if you can’t think for yourself and set your own agenda?
If the global system is indeed moving toward greater uncertainty and fragmentation, the next question is how regional actors respond to that environment.
Beyond geopolitical balancing, how can ASEAN sustain high growth and move up the value chain in this environment particularly while maintaining openness to trade, investment, and technological upgrading?
I appreciate the question—but notice that it repeats the old development playbook: manufacture and export to wealthy markets, climb the value chain, stay open to trade. That playbook is ending, if it hasn’t ended already. Refusing to see that means chasing answers to a question that is no longer the right one.
Take “high growth.” ASEAN economies face an existential ecological crisis; the region is acutely exposed to extreme heat, rising seas, and floods. Conventional high growth was built by depleting natural resources to make low-cost exports, on the assumption that a society could get rich first and clean up later. That is gone. Environmental protection and climate adaptation are no longer luxuries to be deferred; they’re conditions for survival. That forces a serious rethink of ASEAN’s growth model and its engines.
The patterns of development and trade are shifting too. The old assumption was that poor countries must climb the ladder rung by rung, low-end to high-end manufacturing, then services. But South-South trade is now growing far faster than North-South trade. Increasingly, demand is driven less by consumers in Northern markets and more by regional demand for new goods and services. In African economies like Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, the rise of media and fashion industries began with local demand, not foreign exports. India is skipping the intense export-manufacturing phase and leapfrogging into services.
These are just a few signs of how the playbook is changing. My informal sense is that, compared with other regions, ASEAN is less attuned to these shifts. Perhaps because the region has long cast itself as following the path of East Asian manufacturing powerhouses like China and South Korea. This is exactly where the mentality of polytunity matters: if you stay attached to the old path, you can’t see the new possibilities, much less seize them.
Industrial policy is one clear example. Everyone—including Southeast Asian think tanks and convenings—are now eagerly championing it because Washington and Brussels have embraced it. This eagerness seems to forget that Asia has practiced industrial policy for decades, but permission to mainstream it came from the West. Simply echoing Western enthusiasm will mislead, because industrial policy in the 21st century takes place in the context of radical uncertainty, where it is increasingly hard for governments to predict winners. Under uncertainty, industrial policy is less about picking winners, but discovering them and then tailoring support beyond the usual toolkit of tariffs and subsidies.
Looking forward, what are the key political, economic, or institutional trends you think observers should watch most closely in ASEAN and Southeast Asia over the next five to ten years?
Over the past decades, ASEAN has made tremendous progress while holding together a remarkable diversity of members. The breakdown of the post-1945 order poses a sharp question: can the bloc move beyond a loose alliance and actually act together to solve collective problems? Under the old globalization model, Southeast Asian economies often competed with one another, making similar products for the same markets at thin margins. With that model upended, this is a polytunity to finally address those long-standing issues.
The deeper question is whether Southeast Asia can exercise intellectual and agenda-setting power. The region has reached for it before. Seventy years ago, in Bandung, newly independent Asian and African nations gathered on Indonesian soil to insist that they would define their own place in the world. It was a remarkable aspiration, but perhaps only partly fulfilled in the decades since, or even forgotten. The breakdown of today’s order is a chance to take it up again: not in the 20th-century spirit of anti-imperialism, but in the 21st-century spirit of multipolar inclusion and agency.
For all the crisis and anxiety around us, this generation lives with far more peace and far higher living standards than our parents and grandparents did. But beyond material progress, can the region reach for more? Can it define its own agenda and its own path, rather than measure itself against benchmarks set by more powerful nations, whether America or China?
Don’t underestimate the power of how you think. Whether it was the European Renaissance, China’s reform and opening under Deng, or Singapore’s post-independence transformation under Lee Kuan Yew, every one of them began with changing how people think.
Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. At JHU, she directs The Polytunity Project and The Multipolar & U.S.-China Forum. To learn more, visit her website or Polytunity on Substack.
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